Like boarding a flight for somewhere promising, only to be met with an emergency landing, Departures never quite reaches the emotional depth it sets out for. This collaboration between filmmaking duo Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely begins at the end, retelling its...
When sad-eyed music student Laura (Paula Beer) is involved in a car crash that leaves her boyfriend dead from an horrific head injury, she shows no signs of trauma or grief. In fact, with the intimation that she was plagued with...
A confession: I am really not a fan of the French filmmaker Franoçois Ozon. He seems like a lovely chap. Literate, passionate, with a major crush on the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But the thought of having to sit through another mediocre annual...
The annual tradition of Cannes head honcho Thierry Frémaux sitting at a little table at the front of a Parisian cinema and reading out his print out of titles with some soft rambling between each drop has happened for the 2026 edition...
European cinema breeds provocateurs, from Pasolini to Haneke to Noé, Österlund and Radu Jude. Although separated by generations, nationalities and genres, these filmmakers never shy away from confronting their audience with the crass, controversial and/or achingly contemporary. Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer...
For those not intimately familiar with the topographical and historical minutiae of the UK, the relatively blasé way in which the British public react to the inciting event of David Mackenzie’s Fuze might seem a bit odd. An unexploded World War Two...
Regrouting blackened bathroom tiles; filling out a commercial tax return; cleaning the mouldering leaves out of a clogged storm drain; grudgingly buying a birthday gift for a racist aunt; reviewing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie… All things that slumber in the dismal depths of your...
The inner lives of buildings and institutions provide an intriguing and enlivening way of looking at the modern landscape, particularly through film. Just as human beings have personal histories that cause their bodies and minds to change over the course...
If you ever find yourself wandering the streets of east London on a Friday night, maybe a few virgin Sea Breezes into your evening, you’ll likely see someone unironically sporting the scorpion jacket that Ryan Gosling wore in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011...
When you have a hit film these days, inevitably the question always arises about a sequel. There’s very little studios love more than a bit of valuable IP, and the pressure to turn standalone stories into franchises, regardless of their suitability, has never...
